Moving Away from Stun and Done combat

[ShadowDimentio]

Bottom post of the previous page:

We could introduce a "second wind" system where taking enough damage cancels stuns for a moment and gives you a chance to react. The whole "stuns don't stack" idea is garbage though, it only makes it obnoxious for sec to arrest people instead of just executing them on the spot.

[Lumbermancer]

Or we could make two different stuns. Stuns for baton, and meme stun for taser.

[IcePacks]

i forgot to mention you're all free to discuss whatever goofy overhauls to the game you'd like remy's still working on my concept so go right ahead and suggest that we divide stuns and add a fuckton of stun rules to an already cluttered system

you guys

if you scroll on back to the post me and steelpoint have been shilling you'd know that i also had a similar angle for stun+cuff killings

also can anyone in favor of a stamina-based damage system inform me of how stamina does anything but make the problem worse

Stamina allows the removal of 1 shot stuns, which IMO are horrible. I still think the 2 shot tazer was a step in the right direction.

Agree on the cuffs though.

Stamina damage slows you down significantly, making repeated hits after the first trivially easy, and heals slowly. Even worse, it stacks with actual damage you take, meaning that being wounded is often a death sentence against this supposedly balanced form of stun, and once you are stunned, killing you is even easier. If your attacker decides to huck you into space, however low your stamina damage is is how long you have until you're permanently stunned up until your death! This includes all forms of environmental damage and damage over time, by the way, meaning that that annoying slow can turn into a deadly perma-stun the second you're poisoned or lit on fire. Especially damning is the fact that, again, disablers (the most prolific and notorious source of stamina stuns) are long-range, pass through windows, have twenty shots from a full clip, border on guaranteed hits once you're hit with the first hit, and slow you to the point where your attacker can outpace you while walking on the second.

But I digress! Clearly, stamina offers a clean alternative to an actual stun (which at least offers you a small window to survive if your attacker is preoccupied), and should replace it outright, making our stun system a sluggish, chain-stunning nightmare.

[Cik]

you're a little biased pax. do you play anything but grieftide assistant?

in actual game modes security and antagonists both kind of need to be able to incapacitate people. this whole thing is what every game mode orbits, just removing the ability to incapacitate people except by laser/gunfire is going to turn the game into TDM, where sec will be forced to break out the lasers to deal with assistants, let alone actual armed antagonists. it sucks to get caught by disabler walls, but saying that somehow that means we should essentially remove tasers' ability to incapacitate more than one person at a time seems a little much. sec is already on it's last legs, blanket nerfing all of their tools is..
uh

not a great idea

[IcePacks]

read steelpoint's big shill post and try again

as for "you're a griefer!" i've played this game for a fucking decade i should know how exploits to kill people work

[ShadowDimentio]

I'm still of the opinion that this is going to be an agonizing change that will be abandoned halfway once the coder realizes they're screwing with the literal heart of the game's combat system.

[imblyings]

remove tasers and batons and even antag stuns

reintroduce martial arts for everyone but security get injectors that can teach the martial art to new recruits because we don't want antags who like infiltrating sec to cry

make sec martial arts more effective at putting people into a grab or chokehold they need to resist or disarm out of, which are one handed, so sec can grab/chokehold/restrain someone with one hand while cuff them with the other hand

stun batons are replaced with telebatons that knock people over much like cream pies do but also slow people

civilian martial arts are not as good at putting people into empty handed restraints or chokeholds but still good enough if you have skill

but most importantly replace tasers with 1911s

[PKPenguin321]

you're a little biased pax. do you play anything but grieftide assistant?

in actual game modes security and antagonists both kind of need to be able to incapacitate people. this whole thing is what every game mode orbits, just removing the ability to incapacitate people except by laser/gunfire is going to turn the game into TDM, where sec will be forced to break out the lasers to deal with assistants, let alone actual armed antagonists. it sucks to get caught by disabler walls, but saying that somehow that means we should essentially remove tasers' ability to incapacitate more than one person at a time seems a little much. sec is already on it's last legs, blanket nerfing all of their tools is..
uh

not a great idea

This with the post above it is possibly the biggest contrast of good post followed by bad past to ever grace these forums
Pax is 100% right but "lol UR A GREY MAN XD how r u so BIASED???" (which is somehow a totally unbiased sentence?).

Basically, you're fucking stupid and Pax is smarter than all of you.

[Lumbermancer]

a fuckton of stun rules

Two stun rules.

[CPTANT]

i forgot to mention you're all free to discuss whatever goofy overhauls to the game you'd like remy's still working on my concept so go right ahead and suggest that we divide stuns and add a fuckton of stun rules to an already cluttered system

you guys

if you scroll on back to the post me and steelpoint have been shilling you'd know that i also had a similar angle for stun+cuff killings

also can anyone in favor of a stamina-based damage system inform me of how stamina does anything but make the problem worse

Stamina allows the removal of 1 shot stuns, which IMO are horrible. I still think the 2 shot tazer was a step in the right direction.

Agree on the cuffs though.

Stamina damage slows you down significantly, making repeated hits after the first trivially easy, and heals slowly. Even worse, it stacks with actual damage you take, meaning that being wounded is often a death sentence against this supposedly balanced form of stun, and once you are stunned, killing you is even easier. If your attacker decides to huck you into space, however low your stamina damage is is how long you have until you're permanently stunned up until your death! This includes all forms of environmental damage and damage over time, by the way, meaning that that annoying slow can turn into a deadly perma-stun the second you're poisoned or lit on fire. Especially damning is the fact that, again, disablers (the most prolific and notorious source of stamina stuns) are long-range, pass through windows, have twenty shots from a full clip, border on guaranteed hits once you're hit with the first hit, and slow you to the point where your attacker can outpace you while walking on the second.

But I digress! Clearly, stamina offers a clean alternative to an actual stun (which at least offers you a small window to survive if your attacker is preoccupied), and should replace it outright, making our stun system a sluggish, chain-stunning nightmare.

Stamina doesn't HAVE to apply the large slowdown it has now. The slowdown can be lowered or removed completely. I think a decrease of around 50% in how much it slows would make things a lot more interesting.

[Steelpoint]

Stamina in its current form is superior to stun in almost all respects. Even if you removed the slowdown I would still use stamina attacks most of the time, if only for the fact you get double or more shots with disable than stun rounds.

I honestly would prefer if we removed stamina and we worked on making stun rounds better, as I've been stating all across this thread.

[CPTANT]

Stamina in its current form is superior to stun in almost all respects. Even if you removed the slowdown I would still use stamina attacks most of the time, if only for the fact you get double or more shots with disable than stun rounds.

I honestly would prefer if we removed stamina and we worked on making stun rounds better, as I've been stating all across this thread.

Or we move the middle ground and have a ranged 2 shot stun, so we don't have the excesses of either 1 hit gg or beamspam to the max.

Wait, where did I hear that before......

[IcePacks]

removing stamina slows would not do anything to make the fact that stamina chainstuns are considerably more lethal and exploitable than a boring ol' stun

a fuckton of stun rules

Two stun rules.

on top of disarms, slips, throws, tables, cultstuns, sleep chemicals, hallucinations, etc.

[Qbopper]

I was unable to sleep the other day and I got the dumb idea of combat without any form of stuns beyond you falling into crit

I mean it's not a very good idea but having seen this thread it's something I'm curious about now - maybe to compensate you could have "stamina damage" as in if your legs become severely injured you slow down, or if your arms are hurt you deal less damage (in melee, anyways)

It's not something I've thought through seriously, but I figured I'd post it here to see how many posts I can get telling me I'm a braindead fuckwit with no idea of what a video game even is

[IcePacks]

a stun-less system wouldn't be any good because all transgressions against other spessmen alike would be punished with death

you've got to balance the game around the way people play it

[Dr_bee]

Why do disablers do more stamina damage and slowdown than lasers in the first place? why not just have disablers do 20 stamina damage, so they are just a way to disable someone without putting them into crit. If someone managed to down you with a disabler under this system you really dont have room to complain as they could have lasered you to death anyway.

[CPTANT]

Why do disablers do more stamina damage and slowdown than lasers in the first place? why not just have disablers do 20 stamina damage, so they are just a way to disable someone without putting them into crit. If someone managed to down you with a disabler under this system you really dont have room to complain as they could have lasered you to death anyway.

Stamina regenerates, burn damage does not. Effectively a disabler and laser take about the same amount of hits.

[Reece]

Replace tasers with tranq rifles.

[cedarbridge]

I don't see why we couldn't just speed up the stamina recovery.

[Steelpoint]

Too much and you make Disablers useless.

I honestly think we're better off just gutting Disablers and making Tasers work properly.

At least we can improve a finished feature, instead of trying to fix a feature that was left half finished.

[CPTANT]

I don't see why we couldn't just speed up the stamina recovery.

I think a better change is reducing the slowdown.

fun fact: I already buffed stamina regen by 50% previously.

[Screemonster]

If "people regenerate too fast to make disablers useful at only 20 damage because it wears off before you land your fifth shot" is a problem then how hard would it be to implement a delay between taking damage and starting to regenerate? That way you could make them the same effectiveness as other weapons, people wouldn't be able to just soak shots and shrug them off, but if they managed to get around a corner or shut a door on their attacker long enough to catch their breath, then recover stamina damage - at a much faster rate than present.

The question then becomes whether the time-to-recovery should be reset by subequent shots or not, I'm inclined to say leave it set by the first shot and if the timer's a nonzero value, subsequent shots just increase damage without resetting the timer.

Icepacks brings up the issue of getting stunlocked by environmental damage as a result of taking real damage faster than the stamina damage wears off, that could probably be fixed either by having this "take a short delay then your stamloss falls off a cliff" system, or by only having the greater of stamina and real damage count towards stuns.

[Remie Richards]

how hard would it be to implement a delay between taking damage and starting to regenerate?

not very

[Steelpoint]

Do I need to keep quoting my big shill list every page?

[Qbopper]

a stun-less system wouldn't be any good because all transgressions against other spessmen alike would be punished with death

you've got to balance the game around the way people play it

yeah that's true

the solution is to ban anyone who dissents with the TRUE VISION of /tg/: high rp if you fight anyone you're permad

[ShadowDimentio]

a stun-less system wouldn't be any good because all transgressions against other spessmen alike would be punished with death

you've got to balance the game around the way people play it

I've warned everyone about this but nobody listened as usual. The admins talk a big game about how removing stuns would be wonderful forever, but somehow I doubt they'd be very happy with their workload expanding infinitesimally as every minor altercation with sec ends with someone shot dead ahelping that they dindu nuffin.

[cedarbridge]

a stun-less system wouldn't be any good because all transgressions against other spessmen alike would be punished with death

you've got to balance the game around the way people play it

I've warned everyone about this but nobody listened as usual. The admins talk a big game about how removing stuns would be wonderful forever, but somehow I doubt they'd be very happy with their workload expanding infinitesimally as every minor altercation with sec ends with someone shot dead ahelping that they dindu nuffin.

People (admins included) are aware of this issue with removing stuns. This is usually why removing or deducing stuns always gets posted with suggestions to further slow normal movement. Look at it this way. When somebody points a gun at you do you A) sax away at turbo speed and literally dodge bullets or B) put your hands up and tell them not to shoot?

A happens in 90% of cases in game because anyone unwounded now can outrun a taser round or at least move fast enough to dodge reactive laser fire.

B happens in more realistic cases because humans can't generally dodge gunfire and certainly can't suddenly evaporate from a stickup at the slightest hint of danger.

Naturally, slowdowns are opposed for the same reasons they are and the complaints are generally warranted. Nobody wants to feel like they're shoving their laggy spaceman around and nobody wants to spend more than a few seconds running the full length of the station. That said, its less of a binary "either you crit them or you stun them" and more of a "stuns are required because everyone is so fast that every confrontation must be resolved in the tickrate window."

[Grazyn]

you've got to balance the game around the way people play it

This is usually true but stuns are a such a core part of the game that changing them will inevitable change the way people play the game. Security is supposed to use non-lethal means to subdue people simply because officers have access to them. Compare with regular crewmembers which are allowed to kill/crit interlopers because the only weapons they have are usually lethal. If stuns are nerfed/made unreliable security will just switch to lethal damage anyway. That's why I say, let's remove all stuns in a swift swoop and let the gameplay adapt to it.

[CPTANT]

you've got to balance the game around the way people play it

This is usually true but stuns are a such a core part of the game that changing them will inevitable change the way people play the game. Security is supposed to use non-lethal means to subdue people simply because officers have access to them. Compare with regular crewmembers which are allowed to kill/crit interlopers because the only weapons they have are usually lethal. If stuns are nerfed/made unreliable security will just switch to lethal damage anyway. That's why I say, let's remove all stuns in a swift swoop and let the gameplay adapt to it.

Stuns should simply not be the superior way of taking someone out.

Stunning should be harder or equally as hard as taking someone out lethally.

Stunning is someone you should do because you don't actually want the other person dead.

[ShadowDimentio]

I had an idea just now.

What if, instead of stuns knocking you flat and unable to act (which is what assblasts so many people), they prevented you from moving, induced heavy screenshake, and made you drop what you were holding (if anything)? It'd be appropriate, as getting tazed stiffens your body up and causes muscle spasms so aiming at would be very hard, and stuns would still be very useful for getting people to hold the fuck still while you arrest them.

[Qbopper]

a stun-less system wouldn't be any good because all transgressions against other spessmen alike would be punished with death

you've got to balance the game around the way people play it

I've warned everyone about this but nobody listened as usual. The admins talk a big game about how removing stuns would be wonderful forever, but somehow I doubt they'd be very happy with their workload expanding infinitesimally as every minor altercation with sec ends with someone shot dead ahelping that they dindu nuffin.

literally who does this

I made a single post about how I was sleep deprived and came up with a dumb idea that was likely already proposed, I've never heard another admin talk about it

[Kel-the-Oblivious]

Tasers should be like real world tasers. You get one physical shot, and then you need to reload. Not just slotting it in a recharger, you need a physical taser cart to slot into the taser to use it again. Those are the only pure stun effect. Short range, one shot, moderate duration.

Stun batons do massive amounts of stamina damage, maybe a small amount of confusion to represent the muscle spasms that follow getting smacked with one. Like the Ratvar spears, if you apply it to a target you are pulling, you "Press the baton firmly to their chest", giving them a constant stream of stamina damage, while draining your battery. They are stunned as long as you apply the baton directly, instead of swinging it at them wildly like a club.

Pretty much anything at applies a stun now applies a decent sum of stamina damage, on top of whatever damage they would normally deal. No more "One shot, you lose, unless they just so happen to mistime their next stun"

From all my years playing, the single most busted and annoying aspect of this game is the stunning system. A lucky punch, extinguisher to the head, sneaky baton, taser fire from down the hall, or if we want to go real far back, the thermal/cloaker/ebow/extinguisher traitor, walking down the halls, darting people who couldn't even see them, then beating them viciously over the head until they moved onto the next victim. These things normally just make me go "Welp, I'm fucked" and sign out, because there is quite literally nothing I can do if they get that first stun off before I do.

We already have a perfectly good stunning system in stamina. There are a few good counters to it, items with stuns could just be modified to do stamina, and those hard stuns that need to exist for sake of balance can be nerfed to represent the fact that only THEY have the dreaded one hit wonder power we've all grown to known and hate.

[PKPenguin321]

You've failed to read the thread and are assuming stamina damage is somehow not as bad as stuns when it is in fact arguably worse

[Steelpoint]

make it so that damage causes you to get up (and heals stamina damage if you're going to do nothing about the bullshit of disablers)

remove (or nerf) disablers (into line with tasers) because stamina damage is stuns on crack(we don't need ranged slowdowns nor do we need ranged variable/potentially endless length stuns)

make cablecuffs (not handcuffs) break when the mob is attacked too much

i won't deny stun and done is bullshit but actually fixing it will be tricky

Slow is not fun. We already have people popping full-body hardsuits on and off just to move faster through our large station designs. Why would you make everyone slower as a result? The speed of the game is what makes combat with other players thrilling; two (or more) people running around trying to get an attack in on each other, with successive blows slowing each other down. The part that seems to bother people the most is when this comes to an abrupt end when one player just stuns the other and beats them to death. What would slowing everyone down do to change that, besides making the encounters less intense?

Armor is fine There was a round where I was a nuke op. I purchased the spesnatz pyro kit, and then proceeded to try and attack the crew exclusively from space. I spent forever in a pissing match with the AI while my team was slaughtered, losing literally all of my weapons in the process. As the crew was escaping, I ran to escape in combat mode and saxxed around trying to disarm people. I managed to kill one guy with his shotgun and willingly stood in place to trade shotgun shots with crewmen because I knew I had better armor. I lasted for an extremely long time, finally succumbing to a taser shot, although I was unable to really kill anybody since most of the shotguns I acquired from disarming were empty. I was a nuke operative surrounded by about twenty crewmen with extremely powerful armor. It still took them awhile to kill me.

There's already a solid divide between armor classes; regular armor protects you in an okay-ish manner and buys you some time in trouble and allows you to maintain speed. Riot armor makes you extremely resistant to brute damage but slows you down significantly. Bulletproof and reflective vests give you protection against two different types of projectiles. These are already well-defined classes of armor, you should leave them as they are and focus on the actual problem here: stuns.

Most importantly, stamina sucks. Stamina is an addition to the stun system. Just about everything about stamina is annoying -- it's indistinguishable from health damage, it slows you to the point where you're a sitting duck, and it adds a stunning component to attacks that include damage, making stun done even worse. When you finally get up from a reasonably lengthy stun, you're still painfully slow, making most efforts to resist whatever your attacker has in mind futile.

Disablers make this even worse. Hybrid tasers can fire a whopping 20 disabler shots; at two shots the target is slowed down to the point where there's very little that they can do, both in terms of escape and fighting back. A third shot stuns them, and you can continually shoot them with whatever remains in your unnecessarily large ammo capacity to keep them stunned with very little fear of running out, unlike tasers. Since damage stacks with stamina damage, you will remain stunned up until your demise if your attacker decides to just beat you to death. Finally, couple this with a long range and the ability to shoot through glass (which there is an abundance of) and you have an utterly broken stunning tool. Disablers pretty clearly demonstrate everything that's wrong with stamina, why would you want to outright replace regular stuns with stamina stuns, which make getting attacked even more deadly and more stun-y?

I strongly urge we go with my idea, for the following reasons:

There should be a second chance if you're being killed. When you're stunned, that's usually it if someone wants to kill you, doubly so if you're restrained since you can't move. If a target begins taking damage when stunned, the damage should reduce the time that they're stunned. This would creative a divide between stuns and lethality, since simply stunning and handcuffing them would cause you to wait for the whole stun. A divide between stuns and lethality should be our ultimate goal, here.

Make non-security methods of restraint even less powerful. If someone decides to try and murder you, a really easy way to do this is to just knock you over, ziptie you, drag you off, and kill you. What I propose is that we give zipties a durability limit. When you take enough damage, your binds break, again creating a divide from stuns and lethality and preventing you from being helpless when restrained. For now I think we should keep the limit on zipties and cable restraints and keep it off of (or increase the limit on) handcuffs, which are harder to obtain and break out of.

Damage should heal stamina damage. Damage stun chains with stamina are the most obnoxious shit ever. They make an already annoying mechanic that much more deadly. What I propose is that we remove the stacking and reverse it so that just unloading a few disablers and switching to lasers doesn't kill a guy instantly. Preserving the divide, et cetera.

Also, space can stunlock you to your death if you take stamina damage. True facts!

Nerf those fucking disablers. I'll let you figure this one out. I honestly think we should just remove them, but that's just me.

Stamina damage was a mistake, born out of a heated conflict during a unchanged feature proposal that was never finished properly. I'm half certain stamina damage is still bugged with projectile weapons.

The common theme I'm getting here is this.

• Remove Disablers and Disable settings from all weapons.
• Any stun weapon, Taser or Baton, do not stack or reset stun time when applied after someone is already stunned.
• Taking damage will cancel the effect of stuns. Likely it'll be a damage threshold so being accidently hit by a pen won't get you up.
• Nerf non-security related method of restraing. Such as making cable cuffs break when damage is taken to the victim.
• MAYBE buff some lethal ranged weapons to deal more damage???
• Movement speeds remain the same

This seems to want to aim to create a system where stun weapons are for capturing and restraining people, whereas if you want to kill someone your better off sticking to your energy guns lethal setting.

The above is literally all we need to do. Icepacks had it on point when he made his post on the combat system.

[CPTANT]

[...]

[...]

The above is literally all we need to do. Icepacks had it on point when he made his post on the combat system.

What are you waiting for? Do you think these discussions ever reach some sort of consensus?

All this is entirely pointless anyway unless someone makes a pull request with those features. And good luck getting that through.

[WarbossLincoln]

I like Pax's idea and the shill posts. We need to keep this fairly simple and identify the real problem. The biggest issue with revamping stuns IMO is making it incredibly difficult to arrest someone non-lethally and I think Pax's ideas won't make it worse. Get rid of BS stamina stuns that last for fucking ever and make it so damage can free a stun.

A sec officer isn't(shouldn't) be damaging someone during a normal arrest. Taser/baton them and cuff them. As long as no one is hurting them it won't break their stun or cuffs.

It hurts low effort murdering. Banana peel + cable cuffs + toolbox won't be nearly as effective.

Traitor murder I don't think will get hurt that much. Stuff like Eswords and Revolvers do so much damage that even if they break a stun you can probably crit them before they can react after getting out of the stun. You're pretty much guaranteed a free hit on someone's head with an esword if you slip them. But there's still a slight chance you can fight back.

It addresses the problem without changing too much, like nerfing movement speed. It doesn't involve splitting stuns into multiple categories which sounds like a nightmare to balance and would just add complexity to the code.

[Armhulen]

have we considered making people immune to stuns for a bit after getting up? It could work though the new meta would be stun cuff kill, only slightly better than stun kill

[Dr_bee]

Maybe have taking brute or burn damage cause the target to generate an "adrenaline" chemical in their system that dramatically reduces stun effects, it would make non-lethal takedowns possible and prevent easy stun and done kills, as actually doing life threatening damage to someone makes them resistant to stuns.

Couple this with the ability to remove cuffs even while being dragged, it gives officers a reason to move perps to the brig quickly but makes stun/cuff/kill a bit more risky.

[Cik]

are we really sure that making stuns extremely time-sensitive and unreliable won't just cause everyone to just use laserguns

are we going to really make every single arrest a shooting match, because i can see it happening and the only way to prevent it would be to either remove security or ban most of the security population which has been reeling since secborg removal

i mean i'd support a testmerge but i think long term the effects of this are going to be pretty cancerous.

[WarbossLincoln]

That's why Pax's changes could work. Stuns would work largely the way they do now until you take damage. Stun->Kill would take more effort, you would need more than a toolbox to auto-win. Stun->Cuff would work but with cable cuffs you would be broken out of them by taking some damage which would give you a chance to disarm and fight back. Sec could still make arrests because they shouldn't be doing damage during a routine arrest. If someone went through the effort of stealing a set of real handcuffs to help them murder then more power to them.